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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

Stephen Hume: Protection from impact of climate change will be costly

Stranded passengers are led from a flooded commuter train in Toronto, a result of one of the extreme weather events so far this year.

Overshadowed by the tragic catastrophe at Lac-Mégantic was Toronto's rerun of the Calgary floods that had occurred just a few days earlier.

Images of marooned motorists, commuter trains becalmed in the middle of new urban lakes, drowned subway stations and torrents of white water thundering beneath overpasses got pushed down the news agenda by the bleak scenes of devastation from Quebec.

Perhaps, as happens in the instant information business, editors were already starting to feel like flood pictures were old news. And what's the big deal about flash floods inconveniencing Toronto after 100,000 Albertans had just been driven from their homes by flash floods there? The big deal is that these two flood events are part of a broader pattern.

A trawl through the news archives turns up these stories: Torrential rains inundate a swath of southern China with death tolls in the hundreds and typhoon Soulik coming hard on the flooding's heels to force the evacuation of 320,000 people.

In Argentina, torrential rains compared to a tsunami inundated suburbs of Buenos Aires. More than 50 people died in the flooding and waters filled residential districts to the depth of the average person's chin.

A brutal cold snap in India drives temperatures in the capital, New Delhi, to the lowest since records have been kept there, with more than a hundred of the city's 100,000 homeless people dying of exposure.

In Brazil, a drought so severe that water levels in the hydroelectricity-rich country's reservoirs fell almost 70 per cent, forcing the utilities to quadruple the amount of liquefied natural gas they had to import and burn to generate enough electricity to make up the power shortfall.

Blackouts knocked out Brazil's important petrochemical industry while some of the richest sugarcane-producing regions saw 30 per cent of the crop wither.

In the Middle East, schoolchildren in Jordan got the kind of snow days more common in Saskatchewan when a ferocious storm dumped half a metre of snow on the desert kingdom's capital, Amman, stranding motorists, disrupting flights and overwhelming government attempts to clear roads.

The harsh conditions - bitter cold and heavy rains - forced the evacuation of refugees from the Syrian civil war from the desert camp set up to shelter 50,000 exiles. And there was severe flash flooding in Palestine's West Bank capital Ramallah, where motorists were drowned.

But in Pakistan, it was hot, more than 50 C, so hot that milk supplies - what there was of them after production fell by 60 per cent - curdled in the normally bustling markets which lay silent and empty as people stayed indoors to shelter from the scorching heat. In the U.S. Midwest, though, it was cold. Mid-April saw single day snowfall records in South Dakota, whiteouts in Wyoming, snowflakes "like cotton balls" in Minnesota, airports closed in Chicago, while in Denver the temperature plunged by 57 degrees in 24 hours.

Until it got hot and the American west experienced more of the lethal, community consuming mega-fires that have ceased to be a generational rarity cited in legend and became almost routine.

And that's just the first six months of 2013.

Well, get used to it. There's more on the way judging from a recent report from the World Meteorological Organization.

It reports that the past decade, which was the warmest since the era of modern measurement began 163 years ago, was characterized by increasingly wild weather events. If the upward trends in greenhouse gas levels and rising temperatures hold, you can expect more and even wilder weather.

That's been the prediction all along from various climate change models, which indicate that the more energy that goes into climate systems as heat, the wider the variability in weather extremes with subsequent consequences in the form of precipitation anomalies resulting in floods, droughts and blizzards, more frequent and intense storms, regional heat waves and deep-freezes, and so on.

So the Calgary and Toronto events may become not freakish episodes separated by long periods of stability but frequent problems.

The increasingly shrill clamour of doubters who argue the world is cooling down notwithstanding, the WMO reports that: The decade ending in 2010 was the warmest since 1850 measuring both land and ocean surface temperatures.

Sea levels are rising higher and faster due to melt and thermal expansion.

There was a more than 2,000 per cent increase in the loss of life from heat waves, particularly in Europe.

The average population exposed to flooding increased 114 per cent between 1970 and 2010.

The number of people exposed to the effects from severe storms increased by 192 per cent.

All of which suggests that federal, provincial and municipal politicians, urban planners, agribusiness forecasters, food retailers and consumers, energy utilities and other resource industries from forests to fisheries had better start thinking long and hard about mitigation strategies for the superstorms, flash floods, monster fires and prolonged dry spells that are increasingly likely to be in the pipeline for all of us.

If nothing else, the floods in Calgary and Toronto are warnings that we have to start investing now in the infrastructure that will help us ameliorate that impact of the bigger, more severe weather events that are just over the horizon.

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